The tool is as good as the craftsman

It’s an old adage: Tools are as good as the craftsmen who use them. As this multinational brewing company has expanded aggressively through acquisition, the company understands consolidated accounting and reporting are essential to continued industry leadership. The company is creating a global business service (GBS) office that can support all operating units and more than 90 global, regional, and specialty brands around the world.

The brewing company invited KPMG to help create the operational spine of the back office, beginning with a BlackLine cloud solution for finance and accounting. Working closely with the company and alliance partner BlackLine, KPMG successfully delivered against the project’s specified goals and went further, powering the brewer’s evolution as a savvy, confident master of powerful technology tools.

KPMG has positioned the company to migrate a number of dispersed accounting functions to a single, global BlackLine record-to-report cloud solution. Through KPMG, the brewer has gained more timely, consistent, and reliable data; real-time dashboard reporting; increased operational visibility; and enhanced analytics and business insight. The specific benefits KPMG delivered include:

• realignment of the global accounting organization’s mission around higher-value activities, such as analysis and reporting, through automation of lower-value, manual intensive activities

• increased visibility for the Controllership team at the executive and board levels, as well as a strategic advisor to the business on performance, compliance, and risk exposure

• GBS strengthened as the single-source provider of back-office support to all line company business units and a center of continued improvement in business process delivery

• the company established as an empowered BlackLine user, through KMPG-facilitated knowledge transfer and skills development.

Working closely together, KPMG helped the company’s GBS organization design and plan implementation of BlackLine’s Journal Entry and Account Reconciliation solutions. KPMG helped the brewer define successful outcomes, assess feasibility, prioritize efforts, configure the technology to the company’s needs, and lay out implementation roadmaps. KPMG:

• conducted change-feasibility assessments, helped configure BlackLine capabilities to the company’s objectives, and set up the implementation roadmaps

• helped the company significantly streamline accounting workflows, with particular focus on faster reporting through reduction in manual approval loops, and leveraged BlackLine’s capabilities to deliver standardized data entry and process governance

• established customized suite of company reports and standardized weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting requirements for users across the brewing company

• combined BlackLine online learning and customized instructor-led training into a blended-learning curriculum for core company users to establish both baseline familiarity and purpose-driven skills development.

Clients want trusted advisors who deeply understand their chosen technology solutions

KPMG leveraged its alliance with BlackLine to deliver immediate product and company insight to clients. They benefit from our strong day-to-day working relationship with our technology partners and dozens of jointly undertaken cloud migrations.

We speak all dialects of accounting

Clients who undertake deep change in their accounting operations value granular, technical expertise for journal entry, general ledger, and reporting close cycles. We keep them abreast of finance of the future best practices.

Visionary clients want journey partners

KPMG worked with the brewing company and BlackLine from an understanding that this is the beginning of a longer journey. As the company’s BlackLine capabilities grow, we’re able to help its accounting leadership consider strategies for next-stage priorities and anticipate the ripple effects of technology change.